Shanmitha Thirumoorthy


2025

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Hydrangea@DravidianLanTech2025: Abusive language Identification from Tamil and Malayalam Text using Transformer Models
Shanmitha Thirumoorthy | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Ratnavel Rajalakshmi
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

Abusive language toward women on the Internet has always been perceived as a danger to free speech and safe online spaces. In this paper, we discuss three transformer-based models - BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and DistilBERT-in identifying gender-abusive comments in Tamil and Malayalam YouTube contents. We fine-tune and compare these models using a dataset provided by DravidianLangTech 2025 shared task for identifying the abusive content from social media. Compared to the models above, the results of XLM-RoBERTa are better and reached F1 scores of 0.7708 for Tamil and 0.6876 for Malayalam. BERT followed with scores of 0.7658 (Tamil) and 0.6671 (Malayalam). Of the DistilBERTs, performance was varyingly different for the different languages. A large difference in performance between the models, especially in the case of Malayalam, indicates that working in low-resource languages is difficult. The choice of a model is extremely critical in applying abusive language detection. The findings would be important information for effective content moderation systems in linguistically diverse contexts. In general, it would promote safe online spaces for women in South Indian language communities.